Google and the Workplace

I don’t really have much value to add to this Farhad Manjoo essay on the things Google does to keep its employees happy — but it’s fascinating, so you should read it.

Google sees pretty much every problem as amenable to solution-by-data. You gather information and then you crunch the numbers seven (or seventy) different ways until the data reveals its secrets. And what works for Google and at Google — because the company is so big and has so much access to information — may end up helping everyone:

Bock’s ultimate goal is to use Google’s experience to answer some big questions about the workplace: Are leaders born or made? Are teams better than individuals at getting things done? Can individuals sustain high performance over their lifetimes? POPS isn’t close to being able to answer those questions right now, but Bock argues that Google can eventually shed light on some of them. “We have the luxury of being a data-driven company with people with the analytic chops who can do the math,” he says. “We also have a large enough scale so that when we run experiments, they’re statistically valid.”

In time, Bock argues, Google’s findings — which it often shares with other HR professionals — may improve all our jobs. “You spend more time working than doing anything else,” he says. “If you work eight or 10 hours a day, it’s more time than you spend sleeping, more time than you spend with your spouse. When you add it up it gets really depressing. You like your job, but for all [that] time it should be — and it could be — something more. So why isn’t it?”

I really hope that Google shares what they learn with everyone, and I expect that they will — well, that they will share some of it, anyway. Those guys are good at thinking.

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Google’s products have gotten considerably better-looking since 2009 — or so I think — so maybe they’ve learned that everything can’t be algorithmically determined. Or maybe they’ve just generated even better algorithms….

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3 Responses to Google and the Workplace

Unfortunately this focus on data über alles has been pushed a lot of tangible technology to the wayside (e.g., transportation systems, housing, etc.). It’s understandable as it is an unbelievable profit margin. It’s a product that can’t easily be assessed by many people, and it requires no materials or shipping in its production, and a lot of it is purchased (subsidized) by the federal government and the defense sector- with varying degrees of separation- making it an ungodly profit margin. Give me the predicted future that never was, of flying cars and cities with underground multi-level pedestrians walkways. Not a world of information overload and intrusion and robotic killer aircraft decimating wedding parties in the third-world.

I think you ought to be a lot skeptical about people who claim “I should not have any objective evaluation of my work.”.

Here is what the designer who quit Google said in the linked post:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

I can’t fault Google for this reliance on data. And I can’t exactly point to financial failure or a shrinking number of users to prove it has done anything wrong. Billions of shareholder dollars are at stake.

If you can test multiple shades of blue to know which creates the highest click-thru rates (when you basically get paid on a CPM basis), then this is exactly what your shareholders – which in this case, includes the executives of the company – should want you to do? This designer thinks he’s some kind of genius who these small-minded engineers just can’t comprehend — then how come his designs don’t get more people to click through?

Jim, it’s good to hear from you. I take your point, but two counter-points:

1) Clickthrough is only one metric of success, and one that applies only to some Google products. It’s not particularly important in Gmail usage, for instance, where Google can harvest lots of data even when people ignore or block the ads.

2) That Google has come to understand the limitations of data-generated decision-making is indicated by the story I link to at the very end of the post, which explains how, since Bowman left, Google has been giving designers freer rein. Google is (rightly) all about data, but that doesn’t mean that every decision can or should be made by crunching the numbers.